Miss Ellicott's School for the Magically Minded
Sage Blackwood
1
CHANTEL
A secret nearly cost Chantel her life, on a dark summer morning when the rains ran down the stairstepped stone streets of Lightning Pass.
And Chantel didn’t even know, at first, that there was a secret, let alone that she had been part of it for seven years. But there was, and she had, and it was a secret that had the power to destroy the Kingdom of Lightning Pass and everyone in it.
She found that out later, after disaster had struck Miss Ellicott’s School, and just after the bit of trouble with the snake. Let us begin a little closer to the beginning.
Miss Ellicott’s School stood like a candle trembling in a dark storm, perched on a steep, twisting street in the peak-built city of Lightning Pass. The school was an unlikely-looking brick building crammed in between two other buildings, almost sitting on the roof of the house just below it. Fate’s Turning was the name of the street, and some of the twists in it were actually old stone stairways. Carts couldn’t come up the street, and only the most determined of horses.
A brass plate on the door read
MISS ELLICOTT’S SCHOOL FOR MAGICAL MAIDENS
SPELLS, POTIONS, WARDS, SUMMONINGS
AND DEPORTMENT
TAUGHT TO DESERVING SURPLUS FEMALES
Inside lived a dozen or so girls, and one boy. The boy was not a Surplus Female. His name was Bowser, and he had been left there by mistake. Miss Ellicott kept him as a pot-scrubber and general factotum.
Chantel was the brightest of the students. There was no doubt about that. While most of them spent years learning to summon their familiars, and ended up with dust bunnies and catnip mice for their efforts, Chantel had already summoned a snake named Japheth by the time she was six. Japheth was small and green, though he had a habit of turning gold in certain lights. He often wrapped himself around her neck, and visitors thought he was jewelry until he flicked his tongue. Much of the time, however, he was off on business of his own.
As for her spells, potions and wards, they were coming along nicely. Chantel privately thought her magic was good enough that she ought to have been sent to strengthen the city wall with the grown-up sorceresses, but she didn’t mention this to Miss Ellicott. Miss Ellicott was not the sort of person to whom one mentioned things.
Deportment was more of a problem.
The fact was, Chantel did not like to deport. Oh, she was good at it, on the outside. She stood up straight, and she curtseyed demurely, and she sat and listened to adults with her slim brown hands folded neatly on the lap of her green school robe. She spoke only when spoken to, although sometimes this involved gritting her teeth so hard they ached for hours afterward.
The trouble was, sometimes she couldn’t help giving people a Look. Because sometimes, people deserved it.
And she thought things. More and more often, as she got older, she wanted to say them. Sometimes she barely managed to stop herself.
Thinking things and having a Look were not good deportment. Good deportment, as one learned at Miss Ellicott’s School, meant being shamefast and biddable.
One of Chantel’s most famous failures of deportment happened the year she was ten. It happened on an icy night when a long cold rain froze the streets of Lightning Pass.
Chantel and her best friend Anna were up on the roof, where they were not supposed to be. An ocean-scented wind slapped their school robes against their legs. Pellets of ice stung their faces. These were things that let you know you were alive.
The moon crept out from behind a cloud. It lit the city, from the castle at the top, its dragon flag snapping in the wind, all the way down to the high wall at the bottom. The wall was called Seven Buttons. It surrounded the city, encircled it, protected it. It kept the outside out and the inside in. It stopped untoward things and strange people from happening to the city of Lightning Pass.
The moon shone on ice-coated streets, which just begged to be slid down. And Chantel loved her city, even if she wasn’t allowed out in it very much. She couldn’t let it beg in vain.
“If we took a big pot lid from the kitchen—” she said.
“Don’t,” said Anna. “You’ll get in so much trouble.”
But Chantel always wanted to know what was going to happen.
So she sneaked downstairs, with Anna in her wake exhorting her not to do it. She tiptoed past where Bowser the pot-boy was dozing by the fireplace (not waking him, because she didn’t want to get him in trouble) and she found the biggest pot lid there was. Then, with Anna beside her imploring her not to, Chantel took the enormous brass key from its hook and opened the front door.
The steps were so icy she slipped and went right down them, and landed painfully in the street. She had to scramble to get onto the pot lid, because she was already sliding, gliding, rattling and flying—down Fate’s Turning, thump-thump-thump over the steps, and then out into Rosewood Walk. She zoomed through streets and twisting alleys—this was being alive! She zipped over a high bridge that arched across the Green Terraces, and—
And off it.
Chantel flew through the air.
But in a generally downward direction. The fact is, she fell.
She might have had time to think, just then, about whether she could have deported herself better and whether Anna was perhaps occasionally sometimes right. But she didn’t think about either of those things. She was too busy scrambling for a spell, any spell! Everything she had been taught, almost, was meant to protect against something: fleas, winter fever, moldy cheese. But there was absolutely nothing that protected against—
SPLUNCH.
Chantel landed on a stone bench, set in one of the Wednesday lawns on the Green Terraces. And it ought to have been her that went SPLUNCH, but instead the bench did. It turned all soft, as if it had been made of pudding.
Chantel picked herself up, feeling rather stunned. The bench, which had become gray blobs on the ice-spiked lawn, gathered itself up and turned into a bench again. She looked around for the pot lid.
It came down on her head with a painful clang. And then another, and another. Raising her arms to protect herself, Chantel looked up at the tall, robed figure of Miss Ellicott herself. Miss Ellicott, standing in the dark garden in the middle of an ice storm. Miss Ellicott, wielding a pot lid.
“Miss Ellicott, what are you doing here?” Chantel was startled into asking, as she dodged the next descent of the pot lid.
“You,” said Miss Ellicott, in tones icier than the night, “are in a GREAT deal of trouble.”
Chantel wasn’t really afraid she would be expelled. That didn’t happen to girls like her, girls to whom spells came easily, girls who had summoned a familiar.
She told herself that.